


poison in the water

by sapphicish



Series: hell or high water [1]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Season/Series 02, Sleep Paralysis, Spoilers, and he's not actually here, faustus is as according to canon aka not portrayed in a positive light here, some faustus & zelda but it's...icky, this isn't incest or implied incest or read-between-the-lines incest it's just not incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-11 01:38:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18420161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: “Dance with me, Zelda,” Faustus says. His face looks grim and dark in the shoddy lighting – silver from the unusually bright moonlight shining in through the window on one side, lit up in gold-amber hues on the other from a lamp on their bedside table. His. His bedside table. Nothing here belongs to her. Nothing ever will.





	poison in the water

**Author's Note:**

> no proofreading we blindly publish like men
> 
> also: i realize i dont have a good grasp on hilda's voice and i wish i did but i dont :( sorry!
> 
> also also: i dont know anything about the layout of the spellman household or literally anything else in this show but oh ariana we're really in it now.jpeg

“Dance with me, Zelda,” Faustus says. His face looks grim and dark in the shoddy lighting – silver from the unusually bright moonlight shining in through the window on one side, lit up in gold-amber hues on the other from a lamp on their bedside table. His. His bedside table. Nothing here belongs to her. Nothing ever will. It's carved of beautiful obsidian stone and she's taking his hand and the music is playing, the music is always playing. The music box is always playing. The music box is always. The music box is. The music box.

Zelda feels the old feeling building inside of her again. Or: it isn't old, and it's new, and it has been with her since he – since he –

She wants to scream. _Open your mouth,_ she thinks, _show him, scream, just let it out, scream, you can get past this blasted spell even if it makes you bleed and choke, scream..._

The music is playing. The music is beautiful. Zelda wants to vomit. Surely she feels it in the back of her throat, all this bile coming up, surely she's about to...surely...

Her body doesn't respond. It never does, not in the way she wills it to. The desperation feels like an aching, open wound all over.

The music is gorgeous, enchanting. She sees the little figurine spinning atop the box over his shoulder where her hand lays. She thought—she thought that she had escaped him, finally, once and for all. Thought that she was free.

_Silly girl._

The figurine is small, and delicate, and it doesn't have much of a face, a smear of red where the mouth is. She thinks it might be smiling at her, mocking her, a flare of crimson among the porcelain curling in her vision, spinning and spinning and spinning, the awful repetitive tune growing louder and louder. It's just her imagination, she knows – it doesn't grow louder, it doesn't grow quieter, it just _is,_ and it just keeps playing.

Sometimes he turns it off, before bed. It doesn't stop the spell, of course, but it's the only reprieve she gets.

Zelda wants desperately to claw it from her skin, her head, to rip open his skin and show him – _this could have been so good for the both of us, if you were just good along with it._

Instead, she dances. The music is playing. The music is never not playing, in her head if not around her somewhere in reality. He likes to see her dance, Faustus, likes to see her do anything and everything all for him, and—really—she had underestimated him. Overestimated herself. This is her fault. Her doing. This is all her fault.

“Are you going to kiss me, Zelda?” Faustus asks, smiling genially, amusement sparkling in his eyes. She realizes then that they've been mostly still for several seconds, their chests pressed together, her hand curling warm and safe and gentle around the back of his neck as they sway together, back and forth and back and forth and back – and – forth, the music is playing, the music...

Zelda kisses him, because of course she does, because she has no choice. He tastes – he tastes – the music – the music box – he tastes like – cold –

Zelda is kissing him, and her mind is drifting again, and that's good.

It's always good.

“Come lay with me, Zelda,” says a voice, far away in the dark.

Zelda takes his hand and smiles, wider, wide, wide until her mouth hurts, her cheeks ache, it feels like her skull is splitting – the music –

The music –

“Of course, husband,” she says, feeling his approval washing over her like a warm embrace. Isn't this all she's ever wanted? And this is what he deserves, what they both deserve, this rush of happiness, sparks shooting off in her brain, except there's – nothing – the song is – it's – she's –

A door creaks open.

The sheets are silk, and she likes silk. And she likes Faustus. No. She loves Faustus. She loves him so much. She's so lucky. Zelda is so lucky. She's so –

The music –

The music box –

 _Zelds,_ someone says, and Zelda opens her eyes to Faustus' face, and then that face turns into something else. Someone else.

Oh. Someone much, much, _much_ better, thank all that is unholy.

The room is warmly lit and it is not _that_ room and her bed is empty and the music is gone, and Zelda hurts. She registers several things at once. The first: Hilda hovers over her, a blurry image but enough to make out the concern on her face, the hand patting at Zelda's. Zelda wants to lurch away, wants to push her away, wants to _breathe._ The music is gone, the music is gone – the music –

The second thing: she is tense, frozen, muscles locked in a sort of stasis that makes her mind jolt awake with an unspeakable sort of horror before her body does. Indeed, her body doesn't jolt at all – she can't move, why can't she...

The third thing is more like several things all in one, dawning on her with such abrupt force that her head spins with it: Faustus is gone. The music is gone. She is safe. Hilda is here. Sabrina is here. Ambrose is here, and Faustus is gone, the music is gone, the music – the box – the – gone, it's all gone, it's all _over._

“Zelds,” her sister says, and sits down on the edge of the bed, brushing Zelda's hair back from her face. It's an unpleasant realization, feeling the sweat cooling on her skin, her hair sticking to her temples with it, the sheets damp beneath her. She prays it's only sweat.

She might not even be surprised if it isn't. What's another defeat, another _humiliation,_ on top of everything else?

Zelda's throat clamps up, and she can't speak even though she tries, and tries, and tries again. It feels like her jaw is stuck; it feels like something heavy and hard is pressing down on the center of her body, pushing her into the bed, restricting her airflow. _I don't know what's happening,_ she thinks, hard and long and repeated over and over again, praying to Lilith that Hilda can hear her. To her great, unending mortification, she feels something wet drip down her cheek.

“It's all right.” Hilda's voice is heavy with sympathy, with a gentleness that burns, and usually that would make Zelda scoff and scowl and say something biting to dissuade her, but now she can't even speak, can't do anything at all. “You're all right.” She pats Zelda's hand, humming softly under her breath until Zelda thinks, quick and sharp, _no._ No music.

She isn't sure if Hilda catches that last bit, but she stops anyway, looking at Zelda for a long time. It feels jarring, like an eternity stretching thin between them, but then Hilda pats her hand again. “It'll pass. It's not fun, is it?” She laughs a little, odd and quiet. “Never is. But it'll pass, don't you worry. And when it does, I'll make you some tea and we can sit downstairs for a while, if you want. Or up here. Anywhere.”

Shut up, Zelda thinks. Please shut up. Please be quiet. Please leave— _no no no no don't leave_ —

“I'm not going anywhere,” Hilda says. “That's the worst thing for this. Being alone. I know. It used to happen to me quite a bit, you know, after you killed me. I'd wake up thinking I was buried, choking on all that dirt, worms and maggots in my throat. I wouldn't be able to move, or breathe. But you are. Breathing. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you are. All you have to do...is just keep looking at me, love. Counting helps, too, you know. Don't give me that look. It does.”

 _One,_ Zelda feels herself start in her head, shakily, even though it feels like a fool's errand. _Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Eight. No, seven. Seven. Eight. Blast and damn it all, this isn't working, Hilda._

“It will.” Another pat. At this point she's starting to feel like a doll, a still and quiet and fussed-over little thing, and that's the last thing she wants to feel like ever again. “Keep going.”

So Zelda counts, and counts, and counts. By the time she's reached the triple digits she feels, finally, like she's beginning to calm. Her chest rises and falls, the ceiling stops swimming and stretching above her, and there is no music. There's the most blissful silence, like she's at the bottom of an ocean, far away from Faustus and his deeds, far away from everything.

Another count of fifty and her fingers twitch, another hundred and she can lean up on an elbow, most of the tension drained from her body. She feels like she's been wrung out, her energy sapped, bones loose and heavy and everything aching from her head to her feet, and trembling—trembling like she never has before, the way she felt like doing under Faustus' command but being wholly incapable of until...now, apparently.

At least there's this realization to come with it, a balm of sorts to soothe her frazzled, raised nerves: it _is_ just sweat.

“There you are,” Hilda says gently, pat-patting at her shoulders and her back and her hands and knees, “poor thing. I'll run you a bath and make you that tea while you soak for a while. How does that sound?”

Zelda wants to spit something hideous at her. There's nothing a good insult hasn't been able to fix in the past – even a _stop coddling me, you idiot_ would do. Would help them both to understand that she is not some helpless, mewling thing in the grasp of a stronger power. Not anymore. Not ever again, if she has anything to say about it – and she does, she finally does.

Nothing comes out. Nothing at all. She ends up nodding instead, averting her eyes.

Even then she catches Hilda's smile, brief and quick and approving before the bed lifts with the departure of her added weight at one side. Zelda sits there, skin cold and clammy, avoiding looking at the dark corners of the room and listening to the water running in the next room over until, finally, Hilda reemerges.

“It's all ready,” she says, more cheerfully than she has any right to, but there's something that swims in her eyes that Zelda understands innately, deep inside of herself, kin finding kin. There is a sadness, a sympathy, an _understanding._

She could do without the former two, and refuses to admit that the latter is appreciated, so she's stuck staring at Hilda until, finally, she snaps. “Well? Get out. I'll not have you lingering like some _phantom_ while I bathe.”

Hilda doesn't look even a little offended, which is – in itself, a little offensive, but Zelda can't imagine she's very intimidating when rising from the throes of some sort of nightmare-induced paralysis. Hilda just holds her hands up and backs out of the room, tapping lightly on the wall as she goes. “I'll be right downstairs. And if you need anything, anything at all, you just yell for me.”

Zelda rolls her eyes and waits until the door clicks shut behind Hilda, which feels much more final than she'd like. Still, she's incredibly grateful for it, especially when she climbs her way from the bed like a newborn calf learning how to walk, tripping over sheets that tangle up in clumsy legs on her way into the bathroom, knowing that she'd rather have that music controlling her every step again than have Hilda see her stumbling about like some sort of cheap drunk.

Zelda pauses in the doorway to the bathroom, swallowing the bile down.

No. No, she'd not rather have that at all.

When she disrobes it's pathetically shaky, and when she sinks into the warm bath—heavy with bubbles and thick with the soothing scent of peppermint—she wants to duck underneath the water and stay there for an eternity, mindless of the way the water would begin to block everything out and fill her lungs until she was choking and scrambling to the surface, sputtering—

Zelda closes her eyes. It turns out to be a bad idea, of course, an echo of that awful music returning to ricochet off all corners of her skull, battering her senses. It had been a nightmare. Just a nightmare. She's had nightmares before, plenty worse than listening to an irritating little tune and being forced to dance with a man whose guts she wanted to see spilling out on the floor. This too would pass, this too would turn inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

If only he didn't – if only the music didn't – wasn't – the music –

_Zelda, wife, pour my wine. Zelda, wife, come to bed. Zelda, wife, dance with me. Zelda, wife, don't hover. Zelda, wife, listen to the music and be quiet. Zelda, wife. Zelda, wife. Zelda. Wife. Wife. Wife._

“Zelds?”

Zelda's eyes snap open and she lurches over the side of the tub, gasping for air, pushing wet hair out of her eyes and mouth. The water has grown cold, the bubbles few, and Hilda is rushing over to help her, tutting sympathetically as she helps Zelda out and wraps a towel around her, ignoring her protests.

“I didn't call for you,” she manages only once they've moved from the bathroom, shooting Hilda a spiteful look that they both know she doesn't deserve.

Zelda does it anyway, because it makes a dark little piece of herself feel better. Despite all of it, Hilda's presence is innately soothing, a warm balm applied directly to her soul or so it feels, like a wordless and silent embrace. It's often been that way, more or less. When she reaches out – which is more strenuous than she'd like at the moment – she can sense dozens of other presences in the household, Sabrina's and Ambrose's and the Weird Sisters, and others, the students they'd managed to save.

They're all warm, in different ways, all welcoming and gentle and nothing at all like the distant chill of Faustus looming over her like a shadow that hungered for everything for himself.

They're warm. And they're safe. And they're hers, now.

That is no small thing, and she's reminded herself of it forcefully when the burden gets to be a little too much, when she realizes that she has few ideas of where to truly go from here and Lilith has not been answering her prayers.

Now more than ever, she thinks, _they're alive, they're mine, they're safe. I'm safe. The music box is gone, and Faustus will get what he most deserves. All in good time._

“I know you didn't,” Hilda says, leaving her at the foot of the bed, “but you've been in for a while, and I wanted to make sure you didn't drown.”

Zelda rolls her eyes as she goes to pick out something more suitable than a towel from her wardrobe, ignoring the way each step sends pain flaring up the length of her body. “My _hero._ ”

When she turns, she realizes that she'd been in the bath long enough that Hilda's had ample time to change the bedsheets _and_ make the tea, which must be what she's thrusting into Zelda's hands contained in a cup decorated heavily with pink flowers. A wary sniff confirms it.

“It's chamomile,” Hilda says lightly, arranging the pillows against the headboard. “Drink up and you'll be right as rain by morning.”

Zelda squints, sits down heavily at the foot of her bed because the feeling is sinking in again, the kind of bone-deep exhaustion that's grown familiar to her over the weeks, made up for by the way the witches and warlocks under her guard have begun to call her their _High Priestess,_ how Prudence swears to her that she will hunt her father down and make them pay and Zelda believes her even knowing that she'll need plenty of help to get the job done, how Sabrina hugs her tight at the end of each night and says three words that make it all very worth it.

“What else is in it?”

“A calming tincture. Just to take the edge off. Go on.”

Hilda has developed that unpleasant look in her eyes that comes on every so often when she's ready to be very annoying to get her way, so Zelda takes a deep breath and downs the whole thing at once.

It hits harder than she expects and Hilda starts looking a little smug.

“What...” Zelda blinks heavily. “What is...”

“You need your rest,” Hilda says, pulling her up the bed and tucking the sheets in around her like she's a child who can't do it for herself, but right now her hands feel very heavy and the rest of her does too, in a much better, warmer way than before, “and I know you'd try to get up and start the day very early if I didn't, y'know...fib a little.”

“I'm going to kill you when I wake up,” Zelda mumbles.

“I know, I know.” Hilda pats her shoulder. “G'night, Zelds.”

“Wait—“

“I was just turning the lamp off—or do you not want me to? Do you want the light on?”

Zelda pulls together enough energy to roll her eyes in as pointed a way as possible. “I'm not a _child,_ Hilda. No. I was going to ask—if you let me get a word in edgewise, you maddening woman—if all was well with...with...” Her eyes drift shut, snap open again. “With the students. What time is it? I need to—“

“You _need_ to sleep. The little ones are just fine. It's my turn to watch over them, hm? You've been doing it practically nonstop for _weeks._ ”

Zelda swallows. She feels her eyes burning, which must be an embarrassing and wholly awful side effect to whatever Hilda put in her tea. “Fine,” she says, and then, “Thank you,” and then, because she can't stop herself, “They aren't 'little', you know.”

Hilda shrugs in her blurry vision, her smile growing. “They're little enough,” she says, and tucks Zelda in tighter. “Do you want me to stay until you fall asleep?”

“Didn't I just tell you I'm not a...” Zelda trails off. It'll be dark, when Hilda leaves, when she turns off the lamp and stands to leave and shuts the door behind her, and Zelda will be alone. Tired, but alone. And if the music returns—

If the music—

“Zelds?” Hilda's voice is soft and close, her hand rubbing at Zelda's shoulder. “Where'd you go then, love?”

“Nowhere. Yes. You can stay. If you want to. I clearly don't have a say in the matter, since you've just... _drugged_ me.”

The bite in her voice doesn't form completely, so Hilda smiles instead of looking wounded, laughs instead of being affronted.

“Good,” she says cheerily, _damn_ her, “I was going to stay anyway.”

“Hilda?” Zelda whispers, fighting the urge to finally sleep.

“Mm?”

“Leave the light on.”

Hilda squeezes her arm, a sensation that lingers even when her hand falls away. “I will.”

Zelda closes her eyes.

The last thing she feels before falling into a blissfully dreamless sleep is Hilda leaning over her and giving her a kiss on the forehead.

**Author's Note:**

> continuation: zelda and hilda fully talk about zelda's trauma the next day even though zelda complains about it a lot. lilith shows up a week later and is like lmao sorry for not returning your texts and also you all need some THERAPY kiddos and sabrina is like uh you need therapy too miss "serving the man who ruined my entire life is all i've ever known" and lilith is like. oh. and zelda is like sabrina YOU need therapy too and sabrina is like. hm. and they contact a witch therapist who exists for some reason and work through their traumas together. also someone gets a therapist for mary wardwell too because she deserves it after waking up some months after her death and missing a rib and a fiance. they ALL talk about their problems they ALL work it out and that is IT!


End file.
